MSD and Wayra team up to find the best healthcare tech startups

MSD (Merck Sharp & Dohme Ltd) has joined hands with Telefonica’s tech start up accelerator, Wayra to launch the first preventative healthcare start-up programme in the UK.

The acceleration programme dubbed Velocity Health kicks off a search for the UK’s best tech start-ups that can develop and market their ideas for early health detection of diseases like cancer, Alzheimer’s, obesity and diabetes.

The digital innovation is ripe for investment in the UK as the NHS funding gap is set to reach £30billion by 2020 and about 4% of NHS budget will be invested in preventative healthcare.

Velocity Health will help identify and prevent the rise of major diseases amongst an ageing population in the UK and hope to add the 100 UK tech start-ups that are already being supported by Wayra.